Are Hair Extensions A Modern Day Phenomenon?

You may associate beauty treatments such as hair extensions with contemporary celebrity style

. It can be quite a laborious and technical process, but in fact there have been versions of hair extensions in use since ancient times. If you choose to extend your locks, you are not only in company with the girls from TVs The Only Way is Essex, but also Egyptian queen Cleopatra.

Cleopatra was known to wear wigs and to have human hair added to her own as a symbol of her status as queen, to which jewels and other adornments could be attached. Their popularity was not limited to women however; it was commonplace for men of high status to shave their heads and use wigs or hair pieces to replace their natural hair. As well as being an act of cosmetic enhancement, this was also useful for hygiene reasons at the time.

This trend continued steadily up until 1800 when fake hair and extensions were frowned upon; at this time it became fashionable to wear your hair as natural and unadorned as possible. This did not mean that the practice disappeared however. During the early 1880s, more than 150,000kgs of artificial human hair were sold in France, so it seems that it simply became more of an underground practice.

Once Asian countries learned how to create hair extensions and wigs, the history of hair extensions changed forever. Made out of human hair, the adornments were coated in beeswax or plant resin in order to adhere to the scalp. Asia remains one of the largest suppliers of human hair extensions in the world today.

Traditionally, hair extensions were only worn by the very wealthy who could not only afford the cost but also could afford to spend up to fifteen hours sitting in a salon chair. The legacy of Cleopatra seems to have endured. It was during the 1970s that the appeal of hair extensions began to grow again, thanks to a roster of celebrities who began to set the trend as well as the cosmetic excesses of the glam-rock era which brought with it a renewed fascination with wigs, fake hair and extensions, not to mention extreme make up.

During the 1990s, pop phenomenon the Spice Girls were avid fans of wigs, extensions and other hair adornments; this led to a younger market purchasing hair extensions and this younger market is one of the reasons why hair products are so popular today. Girls Aloud clearly owe much more to their nineties predecessors than just their music.

by: Helen Turley

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